Andrei Tarkovsky

Between Two Films

The following article by Andrei Tarkovsky first appeared in Iskusstvo kino 11 (1962) 82-4 (in
Russian).
It is published here for the first time in English. Translation copyright by Robert Bird (University of Chicago, Slavic Languages and Literatures).

Meeting with viewers of Ivan's Childhood I have often
been glad to hear both praise for the film and friendly
criticism. Perhaps it would be useful to include more
participants in these conversations, when one film is behind
us and we are thinking through the next one.

I received and read V. Bogomolov's story "Ivan" together
with the screenplay that was offered to me. The story
struck me as better than many sentimental and didactic
stories of young heroes which inevitably feature the
following episodes: 1) the infant deceives an enemy officer;
2) the infant is dressed in a child's uniform and is fed
with sweets; 3) he is adopted by a military unit, either a
border patrol, submarine, or garrison orchestra.

The main protagonist of V. Bogomolov's story attracted me
by the holistic movement of the same theme as that which is
shown, admittedly with more power, by Fedor Dostoevsky in
some of his characters. This is a character created and
absorbed by war.

Beyond the diligently described military episode I wanted to
see the grave changes which war makes in the life of a man,
in this case a very young one. To see a truthful depiction
of its hardening and resistance, and to show its battle with
the insanity of militarized death. To this effect I added
to the film dreams which attain central significance in
the film's ideas and composition. Of especial importance is the
final dream, which we the viewers see after we find out
about Ivan's execution. The viewer sees a protagonist who
no longer exists and absorbs into himself elements of his
real and possible fate. This final dream, the run along the
river bank, was created not to lighten the film's finale (as
some have thought); that would be false and distasteful in a
work in which the majority of protagonists die (despite the
fact that as authors we held to an optimistic point of
view). Instead, this is a cinematic-poetic tragedy.

In this sense the storyline of Masha is far from a "romantic
interlude," and Kholin's reserve towards her is not a
tribute to editorial or commercial virtue. The kiss over
the trench, in my opinion, is remotely and quite indirectly
associated with a graveside kiss. And this is another
tragic image, at least to my mind. There is the pre-marital
joy at a waltz and another kind of joy, one Pushkin
described as "on the edge of a gloomy
abyss" [1]. That is what we needed.

It took a long time to find a location for the "dance of the
birches." We looked through dozens of birch groves. We
found it outside Moscow. My cinematographer Vadim Yusov was
overjoyed. During the shoot I walked alongside him,
clapping my hands and counting "one-two-three...one-two-three..." Seriously, though,
this sterile birch texture of a spectrally-beautiful forest
somehow hints, even if extremely indirectly, at the
inescapable "breeze of the plague" which pervades the
existence of the film's characters. In the film we
connected the episodes to each other based on poetic
associations. The montage was inspired by emotions, not by
the direct sequence of events.

In V. Bogomolov's story the atmosphere of tense
anticipation replaces an account of the scouts' expeditions;
one feels what it's like when the front is expecting the
decisive hour. The soldiers use this time to sew on
buttons, clean their weapons, listen to records, and
remember their homes. People start writing letters and give
themselves over to recollections and a particular nervous
state of mind. Modern cinema has accumulated means for
analyzing such slow moments. It is no longer alien to the
idea that "life like the silence of autumn is detailed." The
quickly flashing shots that is typical of the quick montage
contrasts of Pudovkin's Saint Petersburg or the
battle sequences of Barnet's Outskirts is hardly
capable of expressing the modern truth of
war [2]. I think that a modern film must give the viewer a larger
amount of information.

At some point in the development of cinematic art it was
possible to edit accented and sometimes even poster-like
fragments without departing from the truth. This is what
created the style of cinematic narrative. Now a larger
portion of the film must be devoted to the slowly passing
minutes of anticipation, delays, and pauses, which are far
from being ventilation holes in the narrative
progression.

If we replaced to a greater degree the direct passage of the
plot with slow nervous tenseness, we would be closer to
success in our tasks. Our film is probably not complete in
this respect. In some things we did not succeed, some
things we did not have time to do. For instance, I was
advised to omit the episode in the village ruins with the
old man (and I also thought this seemed preferable), but it
was too late.

I am sick of contrasts like: a church in the war, a church
in artillery fire. We failed to find locations for a less
conspicuous solution. The command point and positions were
supposed to be located at a ceramics factory with a strange
outline. And during the artillery fire there was supposed
to be a deserted scene of carts on narrow tracks filled with
unfinished raw production. These were supposed to move back
and forth due to the force of the shock waves. I am most
envious of Mikhail Il'ich Romm who had the will and means to
replace the shot in Nine Days where Gusev and his
wife contemplate a buried radioactive plate with a simple
walk-through of Batalov against the background of the
Mosfilm wall [3]. Here the
symbolism of a literary screenplay was replaced by an
element of visual cinemagenics... We should keep it this way!

But sometimes the concrete conditions of work dictate useful
constraints and one must sense the "artistic direction" of
nature in difficulties that arise and in the impossibility
of other solutions. We had the following plan for landing
the scouts on the opposite bank: thick fog, black figures,
and the flashes of flares; the figures cast shadows on the
fog, incorporeal sculptures of a kind. However the light
breeze of the Kanev flood plain (where we shot the "drowned
forest") would have destroyed our smoke constructions. Then
we thought of showing various perspectives on the landing
during the rocket flares and contrasting them together in
approximately the following way: a flare illuminates a shot
of two men and the shoulder of a third with movement to the
right; another flare shows three small figures in the
distance moving away from us; another flare illuminates a
shot of eyes and wet branches... etc.
However when the idea of a montage "of flares" fell away, we
filmed the material that ended up in the picture and this
turned out to be probably simpler and more impressive.

The experience with this material helped me sense a tendency
that I will try to formulate or at least outline. The
shortcomings of contemporary film direction are more or less
common to all. One of them is the excessively direct
language of the mis-en-scène.
If, during a conversation with a woman, the protagonist
places his foot on a chair where her clothes are hanging,
this means that a "fault" has opened up in their relations
and he no longer loves her... Since the
mis-en-scène should "express the
essence," as lecturers often say, we immediately see the
shallow bottom of the shot. The action in the shot is
organized intellectually, although in fact man's psychic
state and its physical expression are not usually
coordinated in such a direct fashion.

An excessively frank and image-laden mis-en-scène
with its subtext open for all to see is part of
a broader phenomenon when a shot is subordinated to the
requirements of literary discourse or obvious imagery. In
one of the most ageless films L'Atalante by Jean Vigo
there is an episode where the newlyweds, a girl and a young
sailor, walk from the church to a
barge [4]. To the sound of a
trivial accordion they walk around three large hayricks, now
disappearing (and we see a deserted landscape), now
appearing anew. What is this? A ritual, a dance of
fertility? No, the episode is significant not for a
literary retelling, not in its symbolism, not in its visual
metaphoricity, but in its concrete saturated existence. We
see a form filled with feeling.

I think that such concepts as intellectual cinema and
intellectual montage have no future...
Cinema will remain an emotional area and one must film what
one has experienced, felt, suffered, and not what one
constructs. (Although in the area of montage rhythm Sergei
Eisenstein's films remain a most valuable example: rhythm,
acting upon the subconscious, helps us to touch the deep
strata of the psyche directly, without associative
loopholes.)

The specific nature of our art must be developed on an
emotional basis. We depended on prose for too long and this
is causing an increasing number of complications. In turn
poetic cinema also has its minuses: as a young artform, it
quickly succumbs to pretentiousness. But it is not only the
authors of films who want to escape clichés, but also viewers.
At the discussion of our
Ivan's Childhoodat the cinema club of Moscow
University one of the students said: "It's good that your
horses eat apples. We are sick of oats and hay."

Poetry can teach us to communicate a large amount of
emotional information with scant means and scant words. The
lesson of poetry is also good for film directors in that it
forces us to value reserve and calls us to be ourselves and
to listen closely to the world.

The poetry of the cinema is not only in the colored glass
and funeral biers with an enormous flower (I have in mind
the film Man Follows the Sun[5])
but also in a greater concision, greater intensity.

When in The Fate of Man the camera rises over Sokolov
who has escaped from a POW camp, such a pull towards
freedom, such will is expressed in its movement, in the
waves of the field of grain, and in the slightly disjointed
figure of the soldier... [6] The only problem is that
the cry of a dog's bark starts too early on the soundtrack.
What he would give to remain here, in this field, under a
quiet breeze, in his Russia!

If it is worth avoiding clichés of
literature and fiction, going hand in hand with poetry and
music, then one must admit: all the more harmful for the
screen is the pressure exerted by traditional painting.
Directors still quite frequently prefer to construct an
image instead of finding it in life. Quite recently in the
film Othello one could have superimposed an entire
museum of reproductions onto Shakespeare's
text [7].

I think that one of the main factors in the aesthetic
authenticity of film is currently the director's and
cinematographer's feeling for texture. Success depends on
the director's ability to conceive and find a concrete
medium and on the cinematographer's ability to "absorb"
it.

A thought that is communicated in texture is minimally
obtrusive but maximally distinct. In one of the shots of
Earth, showing the work of a horsedrawn plough from a
very low point of view, Dovzhenko and Demutsky contrasted
two types of loose, friable soil: the black ploughed earth
and the white clouds, which were as if ploughed.

The path away from "literary narration" towards "cinematic
event" is opened by "absorbing" the medium on the film stock
(a central role here is played by the cameraman's
gentleness, a quality Vadim Yusov has in droves), creating a
shot that acts upon the viewer by its contrasts or by the
unity of its surface. Let us say a man is walking along a
white wall covered in shells. The cut of the blocks, the
character of the cracks and, so to speak, the rustle of
ancient seas that is condensed in their silence creates a
single circle of ideas and associations, a single part of
its characterization. Another appears when we take the
opposite viewpoint and the hero moves against a background
of a dark-grey sea and black pyramidal trees grouped
arythmically. He changes the tilt of his head, he argues
with the decisions he just made. In other words, we move
not on an abstract-logical path, where words and actions are
assigned a value from the very beginning, but along a poetic
path. In this way we avoid literary discourse and, at the
end, can say with Pushkin's words: